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                      SEMANTICS/PRAGMATICS WORKSHOP


              Vivienne Fong 		 and 	Arto Anttila
              National U of Singapore	        Boston University
                   

                           Wednesday, June 10th
                               11:00 AM

                     Room 146, Linguistics Department
                           Margaret Jacks Hall

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TWO CASES OF PARTITIVITY

Many languages employ the grammatical construction "X (out) of Y" to
express part-whole relations. It has been observed that in partitive
constructions such as (1), the NP embedded under the preposition `of'
must be definite. This is known as the Partitive Constraint
(e.g. Jackendoff 1977, Barwise and Cooper 1981, Ladusaw 1982, de Hoop
1997).

(1) a.  most of the children
    b.	*most of some children

Finnish uses two distinct morphological cases to express part-whole
relations: the Partitive and the Elative. In this talk, we make the
following points:

	First, we show that it is the Elative that is used in
partitive constructions such as (1). However, the constraint on the
embedded Elative NP is not that it must be definite, but rather that
it be quantitatively determinate. The well-formedness of examples like
`Two out of three dentists recommend Mentadent' which is a problem for
the original formulation of the Partitive Constraint is accounted for:
the embedded NP is indefinite, but quantitatively determinate.

	Second, we extend Fong's (1997) analysis of directional
locatives to part-whole interpretations. We assume that directional
locatives denote ordered structures independent of space and time and
analyze part-whole relations as instances of the subset relation,
which is a partial order between sets. This unifies three different
uses of directional locatives: the spatial, the temporal, and the
partitive. We also make the cross-linguistic prediction that if
partitivity is expressed by directional locatives in a language, the
Elative (the `out of' case), not Illative (the `into' case), is the
case of choice for denoting part-whole relations.









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